Black Sabbath - 13 (Vertigo)
Well, it's finally here--Black Sabbath's first studio album in 18 years and first with original vocalist Ozzy Osbourne since 1978 low point Never Say Die! A whole huge article could be written just about the hype surrounding this album, which has been endlessly leveraged to create what the band and their label undoubtedly hope will be a huge debut sales week. Amid all of the pontification by critics and message board denizens, and the simultaneous ginning-up of fan excitement through minor revelations and product tie-ins, it's easy for the actual music to get lost. But now, with the album's release date arriving next week, and advance streams hitting the internet, it's time to stop talking about what this record might end up being, and start figuring out what it actually is. This is where we find out if all of the hype was truly merited.
One immediately noticeable fact about 13 is that it's full of long songs. With a running time of 54 minutes, it features eight songs, five of which are over seven minutes long. Even by Sabbath standards, this is a lot to take in. The record begins with "End Of The Beginning," a song that starts out by recapitulating the band's theme song and first-album opener, "Black Sabbath," to a surprising extent. It's based around a single riff, which has four chords to "Black Sabbath"'s three but is otherwise set up in much the same way. Loud, heavy instrumental intro leads into quiet, undistorted verse, then back into heavy chorus, all using the same riff played at different volume levels. It's not bad, but it's hard to get excited about such a blatant retread. Fortunately, at the three-minute mark it speeds up, though not in the same way that the last minute of "Black Sabbath" speeds up--no, this turns into what sounds like a modern stoner-rock style uptempo riff, maybe even something Clutch or Monster Magnet would do. After a bit, this riff transitions into a more melodic section that is the first hint of the kind of thing I was afraid of with a new Black Sabbath album--the influence of not just modern metal but bad modern metal. It's not awful, but this minute-long segment of "End Of The Beginning" sounds kind of like a mediocre recent Ozzy solo track, which is a poor substitute for classic Sabbath. Finally, at around the six-minute mark, things slow back down a little bit and the song ends with an extended riff on the kind of minor-chord melody that always made me really happy when they'd show up on original Ozzy-era Sabbath songs (think "Wheels Of Confusion" or "Killing Yourself To Live").
"End Of The Beginning" sets the tone for the entire album, though Sabbath thankfully avoid any other blatant reworkings of classic older tunes. However, a lot of the riffs that show up on 13 sound like modern stoner-rock riffs, and in a weirdly depressing way. It's as if, after spending nearly two decades as an occasionally-touring act that got by on playing their old tunes, Sabbath has had to go back and study the advancements that have occurred in a genre they invented, and are now playing catch-up to kids who are a generation younger than them. They do manage to draw a line between themselves and bands that have followed in their footsteps at a few points on the album, most notably on the incredibly bluesy "Damaged Soul." Black Sabbath's choice to abandon traditional blues guitar moves and chord progressions in favor of influences taken from classical, jazz, and British folk music was what initially separated their sound, which became ground zero for an entire musical movement, from the blues-based acid rock of fellow late 60s amp-destroyers like Cream, Blue Cheer, and Led Zeppelin. Hearing them add strong doses of the blues to a song that otherwise wouldn't be out of place on an early Sabbath record demonstrates what might have been had Sabbath never broken from the tradition out of which they arose.
Arriving at the album's halfway point, "Zeitgeist" is a clear inheritor of the acoustic-guitars-and-bongos tradition of "Planet Caravan." Not as psychedelic as the Paranoid deep cut, there's nonetheless enough echoplex and moody atmosphere here to make the resemblance obvious. And of course, any seasoned fan will immediately recognize this song's place in the lengthy Sabbath tradition of including token acoustic songs on their albums. Ozzy's foreboding vocals here and throughout the album help to emphasize 13's resemblance to the darker sound that prevailed on the earliest albums in Sabbath's discography, rather than the more upbeat rock tunes of their later albums. Sabotage this ain't. But does that mean that the band is keeping it real, or that they've picked up on the prevailing trend in the modern metal community? From an outside perspective, this question is impossible to answer, and the benefit of the doubt you're willing to give these guys will probably be determined by how good an album you think 13 is.
Personally, I don't hate it--which is better than the worst case scenario I prepared myself for. But I don't love it either, which will probably be the fate of many clued-in metal fans. This album seems destined to be most popular with older fans who, like the band members themselves, haven't kept up with the recent history of the genre. Fans that find Eyehategod or Electric Wizard too harsh but see Queens Of The Stone Age as the epitome of the current heavy music scene are also the sort of fans who probably wouldn't check out a modern stoner-rock record if it weren't recorded by a band they grew up listening to. These fans won't recognize the moments (and there are several here) where Sabbath cross the line into embarrassing old-dude moves. They also won't have heard riffs just like the ones on this album a hundred times before.
In a way I envy those fans. They can get a much more honest level of enjoyment out of this record than I can. I recognize that this isn't a bad record in any way. The band is still in fine form--Ozzy can still sing, Tony Iommi's guitar skills are as powerful as ever, Geezer Butler grounds the riffs with a rock-solid bass tone, and session drummer Brad Wilk (Rage Against The Machine) proves himself capable of stepping into the shoes of original drummer Bill Ward. What's more, Sabbath have a strong enough sense of dynamics and melody to keep an hour's worth of stoner riffs from getting samey and boring (which some bands much younger than them are unable to do). If you're looking for an enjoyable metal record to jam while you're sitting on your front porch after work on a sunny afternoon, or to blast while you're taking a long drive at night, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than 13. Unfortunately, the hype cycle around this record doesn't really allow for an album that is solid and enjoyable but not a classic of the genre to get a positive reception. Instead, expectations have been created that are nearly impossible for the band to meet, and the result is a disappointment that's predictable to the point of inevitability.
What Sabbath have really done to make this record a disappointment is not to make a bad record (they haven't done that), but merely to bring themselves down to earth. With 13, they've proven that they are just as capable of making a halfway-decent-but-not-great record as any of the million or so bands that they have influenced over the years. Plenty of people out there might argue that this was proven decades ago by lesser Sabbath albums like Technical Ecstasy or Born Again, and in some respects, those people are right. However, by reuniting (most of) the lineup that produced their canonized early work and attempting to present 13 as a true followup to the legendary first six albums, the Iron Men of Black Sabbath have shown themselves to have feet of clay.